The Contrast
by vodka straight
Summary: The contrast is my life, is Donna, is my weird, twisted happiness, is the chime of the bells, is the gray DC skyline and the rain that comes with everything. --joshdonna


It's raining. It's raining outside my window and everywhere in Washington. Down Pennsylvania Avenue and on the roof of the White House West Wing. The sky is the same color above everyone's heads, the same color as Donna's eyes when she starts to cry. She's not like most people-her eyes don't get red or pink. They turn a kind of 3-D gray, and they shiver like people in the cold, like a reflecting pool before there were mirrors, and you can see everything you need to in them.  
  
It's raining in Washington DC and Donna Moss is standing outside my apartment door, and she's holding a soaked black hat in on hand and my hand in the other, and her eyes are gray and full like the sky reflecting off the water.  
  
And when her tongue touches mine it's not how I thought it would be. It's slower and more painful. It's a reminder of just how long I took to stop being an asshole.   
  
We're on the bed and the white sheets are clean and warm with my recent sleeping and we don't roll or tangle, we just lay still. She shifts, her hips thrust upwards and back again, but we lay still and our rhythm is one of silence and calm. I lay beneath, looking up at her, and it's an odd kind of feel, her thin, fragile looking body over mine, her small eyes closed, her strong hands clutching the pillow beneath my head. She smells like coconut shampoo and gray Washington rain and she makes me think of all the things I've tried to do over the last five years. She makes me want to be better.  
  
Her skin is flushed in the cheeks and pale on her stomach, so she looks like a plastic Barbie, the kind my sister used to play with back in the time when all my memories come with background music.   
  
(*Avi Maria*)  
  
No. You don't have to be crazy to create something beautiful. We're doing it, and I think that maybe we're not crazy yet.   
  
Her eyes are no longer gray but a lightening blue that hollows me. I can feel her hands in my hair as I come, and her blue eyes close against my chest.  
  
When I wake up, the sky is gray but tearless and she is asleep next to me, atop the covers, naked. The light shines across her skin in stripes from my cheap blinds, and her skin is smooth and powdery like sugar and clean like her. Her blonde hair falls over my dark blue comforter and the contrast is suddenly enough to bring tears to my eyes. The contrast is my life, is Donna, is my weird, twisted happiness, is the chime of the bells, is the gray DC skyline and the rain that comes with everything.   
  
If she can be here now, despite everything, despite how I thought I was a good man to begin with and now I don't know what I am, despite how much I could love before we did this and how much I've lost because of it. My capacity for love. I feel smaller. I feel less efficient, like suddenly I can't hold as much. Like there's a leak somewhere. But if she can be there, against the blue of the bed I keep alone, this ray of light from another world, this splash of cream and powder against my sleepy, blue obscurity, if she can be here, now, not before but now, there must be something righteous. There must be something good in what we've been doing. Or maybe she just pities me.  
  
  
  
I've got to believe the earlier. I've got to believe that I have something better in me because of our goals to reset the world. I've got to believe that I am good, that I am smart, that I have something in my soul now that I didn't have before. Something that will make it a little lighter, a little truer.   
  
Donna shifts her naked leg to side of the bed so that her calf slips off a little. Her clear toenail catches the light and shines like a dime.   
  
Maybe this is what I took. For now, maybe this is enough to convince myself that we did good. That everything that smothered us and what we wanted to do didn't win completely. Maybe this is how you gage it in the end. In blonde hair and blue bed sheets and rain and cheap blinds. Maybe this is how you know.   
  
Her blue eyes open and I think that if there were a scale for that, a number for that, it would be pretty damn high.   
  
end 


End file.
